Free tools / Money
Project Profitability Reality Check
Find the hour at which a project stops making money and starts costing you.
Why this exists. Firms discover a project lost money at the end of it. Nothing free lets an architect check before signing.
Everything here is calculated in your browser. Your numbers are never sent anywhere, stored or seen by us.
- Total hours
- 460 hrs
- Direct labour cost
- $13,880
- Loaded labour cost (with overhead)
- $34,700
- Direct expenses
- $1,500
- Total cost
- $36,200
- Effective rate you are actually charging
- $97.83 / hr
- Blended loaded cost per hour
- $75.43 / hr
- This project goes negative at117 hours of headroom
- 577 hrs
How this is calculated
- Costs entered should be salary cost per hour, not billing rate. Overhead is applied on top.
- The break-even hour count holds your role mix constant. In practice overruns fall disproportionately on senior staff, so real headroom is usually smaller than shown.
- Direct expenses are treated as unrecoverable. If you rebill them, enter zero.
This is a planning estimate, not professional advice. Read the full disclaimer.
If the margin is thin, more of the same work will not fix it.
The studios that price well are the ones that are not desperate for the next project. A free growth audit looks at why your pipeline is where it is.
Talk to the founderThe thinking behind it
Where this number comes from.
The discount nobody names: what scope creep costs a studio
Additional work absorbed without a fee is a discount you never agreed to, applied after the contract, on the work you least expected to do.
PracticeWhere an architecture firm’s margin actually leaks
Six places the fee disappears between the proposal and the bank, the published benchmark for each, and the uncomfortable finding that the two metrics everyone tracks barely predict profit at all.